Limited Government Is

Tag Archives: Osama bin Laden

Following a New York Post article, which released new and revealing snippets from the pages of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, a 2012 controversy about the nature of Huma Abedin’s associations, has again kicked into high gear. While some in the media have attempted to defend Abedin, and the journal, they’ve played fast and loose with the facts.

At the heart of the matter is Abedin’s involvement with an organization founded by a man named Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Saudi official who spent decades involved with organizations which would go on to be designated for engaging in terror finance.

You may not realize that, when U.S. Navy SEALs showed up at Osama bin Laden’s hideout for the purpose of putting a bullet in his brain, they also carried off a sizeable number of documents pertaining to Al Qaeda’s operations around the world, including information about which nations provide substantial support in the form of both financing and access to territory, training facilities and so on.

I’ll give you one guess which country was a prominent supporter. I’ll give you a hint: Obama and Kerry recently negotiated a deal with this country that relieves it of economic sanctions while making it much easier for it to cheat on inspections of nuclear weapon facilities it is not supposed to have. Any country coming to mind?

Fourteen years after 9/11, the U.S. government maintains a robust “stonewall of official secrecy” to hide droves of documents that would likely expose incompetence inside the nation’s intelligence agencies and deceptive relations with foreign governments.

A key portion of the information that was withheld by President George W. Bush has been kept hidden by President Obama so this is not a partisan issue, but rather an ongoing effort by the government to keep the truth from the public. The alarming details are provided in a hard-hitting news article published by a nonprofit journalism watchdog on the 14th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Among the information that long ago should have been made public are 28 blanked-out pages in Congress’s 2002 inquiry into the attacks regarding “foreign support for the hijackers” – read Saudi Arabia.

Additionally thousands of significant records that should be available to the public after all these years remain off limits, including information that was provided to the 9/11 Commission for its 585-page report on the attacks that killed thousands. The Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, was quoted in the story saying that he was “surprised and disappointed” that the documents remain hidden. “I assumed, incorrectly, that our records would be public,” Hamilton said. “All of them, everything. I want those documents declassified. I’m embarrassed to be associated with a work product that is secret.”

Several tweets from an Islamic State follower identifying himself as Abu Mohammed al-Khorasani hint that the terror group could be plotting new attacks inside the U.S. on the upcoming anniversary of 9/11.

A tweet featuring the Twitter hashtags ILLINOIS#, #11septmber and #KillAllAmericans went out at 12:04 p.m. Monday Aug. 31 saying, “Peace on the P.K. [a kind Russian machine gun] Its shots are thematic (rhymes) It strikes America. Our State is victorious.” A photo of the second airliner just before it hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 appeared in the tweet.

Six minutes later, al-Khorasani tweeted the same hashtags together with a muddled Arabic phrase saying, “If you say to me, Dushka (a kind of Russian machine gun) Oh God, You have a petitioner (Masha, rhymes with Dushka) He strikes America [sic] and our State is victorious.” A graphic saying, “every American citizen is a legitimate target for us,” followed the text.

On Sunday, al-Khorasani wrote a similar threat, saying “SOON,” accompanied by an image of Osama Bin Laden and images of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

WOW, watch author Don Brown blow the lid off of the official government report about the tragic shoot down of SEAL TEAM SIX helicopter, Code Name – Extortion 17.

On August 6, 2011—three months after members of Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden—Taliban forces took down a United States helicopter, call sign “Extortion 17.” The attack killed the Air National Guard crew, seven unidentified members of the Afghan military, and seventeen members of Navy SEAL Team Six—warrior brothers from the same Team that had killed Osama Bin Laden just ninety days prior.

Were the seven Afghan soldiers aboard that helicopter really undercover Taliban who either maneuvered the chopper within easy range of being shot down or sabotaged it from within? Were the SEALs sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and deliberately flown into a known Taliban hot zone?

Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer stationed at the Pentagon and a former special assistant United States attorney, re-creates the wartime action, tells the life stories of the elite warriors our nation lost on that day, and tears apart the official military explanation of the incident contained in the infamous Colt Report, which reveals either gross incompetence or a massive cover-up.

This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

“High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”

Hersh’s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

In addition, the source said that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission.

“Obama’s speech was put together in a rush,” Hersh wrote of Obama’s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans.

“This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following,” he added.

“This was not the fog of war,” Hersh quoted his anonymous source as saying.

“The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed,” the source added.

“And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly,” the source said of Obama’s advisers’ response to his speech on the raid, Hersh wrote.

Hersh’s report also accuses the Obama administration of embellishing the details of the raid itself and presenting al Qaeda as a bigger threat than it actually was before bin Laden’s death.

A federal parole board has cleared another Guantánamo “forever prisoner” — a 37-year-old Yemeni who the U.S. profiled as having met Osama bin Laden — for release from the detention center in southeast Cuba.

“I am against violence. I don’t have the least intention to spend any more time with other detainees,” Mashoor al Sabri told the board last month. Although a Yemeni citizen, he said he was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and would like to return to family there, in Mecca, notably an ailing mother with high blood pressure.

The three-paragraph decision, obtained Friday by the Miami Herald, said the board is recommending release “subject to appropriate security assurances” in consideration of Sabri’s “low level of training, renunciation of extremist ideology, and lack of a leadership position in al-Qaida or the Taliban.”

The Sabri release decision means that of Guantánamo’s 122 captives, 57 are now approved for transfer. The vast majority of them, as is Sabri, are Yemenis who are ineligible for repatriation because of the Arabian Gulf nation’s spiraling violence and powerful al-Qaida franchise. Ten other prisoners are in war-crimes proceedings, and another 55 are either candidates for war crimes trials or forever prisoners.[…]

The board recommending release noted that in his time at Guantánamo, Sabri had “generally compliant behavior” and had taken part in prison programs, by his account, nutrition, computer and health classes. He briefly made his plea for freedom March 3 in English, saying he had learned it at the prison.